I stood on a hill and laughed out loud. I
had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite
bank from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the tribal
hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile homes. I
could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with
littler goats scuttling across the landscape. I knew I was looking at a civilisation older
than Hinduism, slated - sanctioned (by the highest court in the land) - to be drowned this
monsoon when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh? Because I suddenly remembered
the tender concern with which the supreme court judges in Delhi (before withdrawing the
legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam) had enquired whether tribal
children in the resettlement colonies would have children's parks to play in. The lawyers
representing the government assured them that indeed they would, and, what's more, that
there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and
down at the river rushing past and for a brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my
rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.

In India for 10 years, the fight against the
Sardar Sarovar dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. It became
a debate that captured the popular imagination. That's what raised the stakes and changed
the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley, it began
to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature
of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These
are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the state. They are being
answered in one voice by every institution at its command. And not just answered, but
answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways.

I was drawn to the valley because I sensed that
the fight for the Narmada had entered a newer, sadder phase. I went because writers are
drawn to stories the way vultures are drawn to kills. My motive was not compassion. It was
sheer greed. I was right. I found a story there.

And what a story it is. In the 50 years since
independence, after Nehru's famous "Dams are the temples of modern India"
speech, his foot soldiers have thrown themselves into the business of building dams with
unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with nation-building. Their enthusiasm
alone should have made anyone suspicious. The result is that India now boasts of being the
world's third-largest dam builder, with 3,600 dams that qualify as big dams. Another 1,000
are under construction. Yet one-fifth of the population - 200m people - does not have safe
drinking water and two-thirds - 600m - lack basic sanitation. India has more drought-prone
and flood-prone areas today than in 1947. Big dams started well, but have ended badly. All
over the world there is a growing movement against them. In the first world they're being
decommissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just
conjecture.

Big dams are obsolete. They're uncool. They're
undemocratic. They're a government's way of accumulating authority . They're a guaranteed
way of taking a farmer's wisdom away from him. They're a brazen means of taking water,
land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs
displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute.

Ecologically too, they are in the doghouse. They
lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, waterlogging, salinity, they spread disease.
There is mounting evidence that links big dams to earthquakes. It's common knowledge now
that big dams do the opposite of what their publicity people say - the local pain for
national gain myth has been blown wide open.

For all these reasons, the dam-building industry
in the first world (worth more than £12bn a year) is in trouble and out of work. So it's
exported to the third world in the name of development aid, along with their other waste
like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides. The Indian
government, every Indian government, rails self-righteously against the first world, and
pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh
is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our
leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging
self-esteem).

The government of India has detailed statistics
about most things. But it does not have a figure for the number of people displaced by
dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of "national progress". How can
you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who paid for it? How can the
"market"put a price on things when it doesn't take into account the real cost of
production?

According to a detailed study of 54 large dams
done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people
displaced by a large dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough
sample. But let's err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of 10,000 per
large dam: 3,300 x 10,000 = 33m. That's what it works out at - 33m people. Displaced by
big dams alone in the past 50 years.

What about those displaced by the thousands of
other development projects? At a private lecture, NC Saxena, secretary to the planning
commission, thought the number was in the region of 50m (40m displaced by dams). We
daren't say so, because it isn't official. It isn't official because we daren't say so.
You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to
yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can't be, I've been telling
myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. I barely have the courage to say it aloud.
Fifty million people. I feel like someone who's just stumbled on a mass grave.

Fifty million is more than the population of
Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number
of refugees partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The
western world today is convulsed over the future of 1m people who have fled from Kosovo.

A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal.
Include Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables) and the figure becomes obscene. According
to the commissioner for scheduled castes and tribes it's about 60%. If you consider that
tribal people account for only 8%, and Dalits 15%, of India's population, it opens up a
whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic "otherness" of their victims
takes some of the pressure off the nation builders. It's like having an expense account.
Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India's poorest
people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest.

What has happened to all these millions? Where
are they now? Nobody really knows. They don't exist any more. When history is written,
they won't be in it. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times -
a dam, an artillery range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start
rolling there's no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on
the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap
construction labour (who build more projects that displace more people).

And still the nightmare doesn't end. They
continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan
out on clean-up missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich
get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the
police for shitting in public places.

The millions of displaced people in India are
nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we are condoning it by looking away.
Why? Because we're told that it's being done for the sake of the greater common good. That
it's being done in the name of progress, in the name of national interest. Therefore
gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we're told. We believe that it
benefits us to believe.

It's true that India has progressed. It's true
that in 1947, when colonialism formally ended, India was in food deficit. In 1950 we
produced 51m tonnes of food grain. Today we produce close to 200m tonnes. It's true that
in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30m tonnes of unsold grain. It's also
true that at the same time, 40% of India's population - more than 350 million people -
were living below the poverty line. That's more than the country's population in 1947.

Indians are too poor to buy the food their
country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can't afford to
eat themselves. Our leaders say we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the
threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves? What kind of country
is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What's going on?

It's time to spill a few state secrets. To
puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial,
essentially democratic, Indian state. Carelessness cannot account for 50m disappeared
people. Let's not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless and 100%
man-made.

The Indian state is not a state that has failed.
It is a state that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been
ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India's resources and redistributed
them to a favoured few (in return no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly
accomplished in the art of protecting the cadres of its paid-up elite. But its finest feat
of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling sweet. The way it manages to
keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of 1bn
people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame - ministers,
bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists. Of course we make it easy for them, we,
its beneficiaries. We don't really want to know the grisly detail.

India lives in her villages, we're told, in every
other sanctimonious public speech. That's just another fig leaf from the government's
bulging wardrobe. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India
gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages live only
to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens' vassals and for that reason must be
controlled and kept alive, but only just.

Its proponents boast that Narmada is the most
ambitious river valley project ever conceived. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will
reconstitute the Narmada and her 41 tributaries into a series of step reservoirs. Of
these, two of the major dams - the Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in
Madhya Pradesh - will hold, between them, more water than any other reservoir on the
Indian subcontinent. Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley development project
is big. It will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India's biggest
rivers. It will affect the lives of 25m people who live in the valley.

Every single claim its proponents make about its
intended benefits has been systematically disproved. Even the World Bank, has withdrawn
from the project. Yet the government is hell-bent on seeing it built. The Sardar Sarovar
dam alone will displace about half a million people (200,000 according to official
estimates, but these are always wrong).

The government claims it is offering displaced
people the best rehabilitation package in the world. I've been to some of these
"resettlement sites". People have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds
which are furnaces in summer, and fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river
beds which during the monsoons turn into fast-flowing streams. Shivering children perch
like birds on the edges of charpais while swirling waters enter their tin homes.
Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current,
floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them. When the waters
recede, they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The
ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes carefully stacked away like
postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable.

And these are the lucky ones - the ones who
officially qualify as what the government calls PAPs (Project Affected Persons). The rest
are just kicked out of their homes and left to fend for themselves.

Truly, it is just not possible for a state
administration, any state administration, to carry out the rehabilitation of a people as
fragile as this, on such an immense scale. It's like using a pair of hedge-shears to trim
an infant's fingernails. You can't do it without shearing its fingers off. How do you
uproot 200,000 people (the official estimate), of which 117,000 are tribal people, and
relocate them in a humane fashion? How do you keep their communities intact, in a country
where almost all litigation pending in courts has to do with land disputes?

Where is all this fine, unoccupied arable land
that is waiting to receive these intact communities? The simple answer is that there isn't
any. Not even for the "officially" displaced of this one dam. What about the
rest of the dams? What about the remaining thousands of "PAPs" earmarked for
annihilation? Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with?

In circumstances like these, to even entertain a
debate about rehabilitation is to take the first step towards setting aside the principles
of justice. Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water
to 40 million - there's something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is
fascist maths. It strangles stories, bludgeons detail, and manages to blind perfectly
reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the 20th
century. The supreme court order that has allowed the construction of the dam to proceed
means that this year 30 of the 245 villages will be submerged. The people have nowhere to
go. They have declared that they will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar
reservoir rise to claim their lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, it is
necessary that you understand the price being paid for it. That you have the courage to
watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs. Be there.

Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize for her
novel The God of Small Things. This article was originally published in The Guardian, 5th June
1999.